Act I, Scene I. Venice. A street.
To most producers of Shakespeare these terse instructions for The Merchant of Venice call for a papier-maché doorstep (left), a canvas backdrop with houses painted on a postcard blue sky. To Producer Max Reinhardt they call for nothing less than a street in Venice. Therefore in that Italian city last week Herr Professor Reinhardt produced a "localization" of The Merchant of Venice.
Able to understand neither the language in which Shakespeare wrote the play nor that in which his Italian mummers were to perform it, Producer...
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